Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.

Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

Too many lives are needed to make just one.

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

Love is seeing without eyes, hearing without ears; hatred is nothing.

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.

I keep my eyes clear and I hit 'em where they ain't.

They're just big in the eyes of the American public.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

Young man, if God had wanted you to see me that way, he would have put your eyes in your bellybutton.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

The decision to go to war is the most important decision that I can make as a representative in Congress. As a veteran, I see any potential military action first through the eyes of the young men and women who volunteered to wear the uniform and would carry out such a mission.

If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness.

Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.

A lot of the stuff that I do with Betty is in the eyes. A lot of the feelings that I evoke with her are unspoken, so that's been fun to play with.

Thou has a thousand eyes and yet not one eye; Thou host a thousand forms and yet not one form.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.